Salon.com Interview with Gwen Ifill, continued
"Washington Week with Gwen Ifill and National Journal" airs on Friday nights at 8 p.m. on most PBS stations. Check your local listings here.
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Objectivity or fairness?
Fairness. No one is truly objective -- considering everyone has his or her own worldview, or a veil of experience that you bring to whatever you do. I was covering the Department of Housing and Urban Development at the Post, and was probably the only reporter at the Post who had ever lived in public housing. So I brought that experience into my worldview of who these people are that who in public housing.
Where was that?
In Buffalo [N.Y.] and Staten Island. As a result, I didn't automatically think people who lived in public housing were a bunch of slackers. You want your experience to inform your writing, not color it. And that's why, when people look at me and make assumptions about what I believe, I like to point to a transcript and tell what it really shows. If I'm doing my job you can't really tell [what I believe], so long as you remove your preconceptions about me from your analysis. What I really want to believe is that someone will be honest with me and answer my question. What's nice about the "NewsHour" is that there can be more than two positions on an issue. There's usually eight!
One always reads about the liberal media bias in any number of publications.
Like Salon?
So noted. Has the media's coverage of the presidential campaign added or taken away credence regarding that claim?
I think that perception has always been flawed. What you see happening is reporters' desperate attempts to present a balanced picture. That means that sometimes they overcompensate for having tilted one way or the other. We are always tipping back and forth, which is why pundits on either side can always find something to complain about. But if you look at the big picture, what we try to do is tilt toward the best story.
The "NewsHour" and "Washington Week" skew heavily toward a viewership of people over 55, and there are many efforts underway to get the 18-to-34 age group watching. Is there a lack of civic engagement among the 35-to-55-year-old bloc?
I don't know. I'm involved in "YVote 2000," which works out of the Medill School of Journalism. There's been a big e-vote thing, and of course MTV has been working hard to recruit younger folks. There's been a bigger effort this year than ever before to get the younger folks involved in the political process. Yet there seems to be as much resistance as ever -- partly, I think, because of the definition of what the political process is. Young folks are more likely to think that public service is separate from politics. Whereas when JFK talked about public service, he was talking about politics. These days that means Americorps or volunteerism. The two spheres are totally different in their minds. Now, when you get to their parents in that middle age bloc, you have this incredibly harried population of parents who are rushing their kids to soccer practice, working 50 hours a week, and the last thing they think they have time for is to sit down and engage in a public affairs program.
One of the reasons that our audiences at both "Washington Week" and the "NewsHour" skew to older people is because they have more time to look at in-depth programs. The middle-aged folks, once their kids leave home, can catch their breaths and watch our type of programming. This was also true at NBC. Their political and news shows also skew toward the older population. That was a constant dilemma. They tried to target older women. If you look at the last half of an NBC news program, you can see who it is aimed at.
Next page: "More Civil Atmosphere at "Washington Week?"
Original source: Salon.com